This. If you have a modern distribution panel, there’s a good chance the manufacturer offers an interlock plate for it. You might have to move some breakers around to accommodate it, but think of it as a sliding metal “door’ or “flag” that when one breaker is closed, the trip handle is pushing against the interlock plate, whose other edge is against the trip handle of the breaker that’s opposite it, preventing it from closing.
That or just buy a smaller distribution panel for the circuits you want to feed off the generator and use the interlock plate to control that breaker. That way there’s no chance you’ll overload the generator - feeding the whole house means you have to shut off all the non-emergency circuits, which may not be easy to do. Backfeeding is potentially dangerous for all of the obvious reasons. I don’t recommend doing it unless you have a qualified electrical contractor design and install the setup. A lot of people do it by just opening breakers, and that’s inherently dangerous. You don’t want to see the results of backfeeding a distribution system, or, even worse, the utility feeding into a small generator. In generator engineering and design terms, we always referred to the utility as an “infinite bus”. As in, you will get as much power as it can give you - until something fails. Which usually occurs spectacularly. Under these circumstances, that is a Bad Thing. -D > On Sep 13, 2023, at 2:13 PM, mitch--- via Mercedes <mercedes@okiebenz.com> > wrote: > > On 2023-09-13 14:01, Allan Streib via Mercedes wrote: > >> If you switch off the main breaker at the top of your panel, that will stop >> any backfeeding out through the meter, correct? This is what a proper >> transfer switch does automatically? > > You can buy an interlock plate which is a sliding piece of sheet metal which > physically prevents you from having the topmost circuit breaker and the main > breaker turned on at the same time. I'm not up to date on whether this is > code compliant, but it does physically prevent backfeeding the grid through > the breaker the interlock blocks. > > _______________________________________ > http://www.okiebenz.com > > To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ > > To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: > http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com > _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
